Invasion Films and the 1990s Interregnum

Abstract

In The Devil We Knew, H.W. Brands underscores the confusion experienced at the end of the Cold War when America’s prime adversary the Soviet Union ceased to be. He notes that as the Berlin wall was brought down journalist Charles Krauthammer had said nations like America need enemies “for purposes of self-identification and motivation” (206). Brands points to a similar mindset in Francis Fukuyama who had predicted an end of history at the time with the cessation of struggle to be followed by “‘economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands’” (209). Amid the epistemological and ethical confusion, there emerged in 1990 yet another problem exacerbating the others, a recession made worse by “the large cutback in weapons procurement” (213) in the context of looming federal budget and trade deficits (215). Americans were facing the possibility that the current younger generation—Generation X—would be the first in decades to enjoy less material benefit than the preceding generations. Categories of truth and ethics being destabilized at the same time as the economy was under duress would make finding solutions difficult in a country already destabilized by ideological divides, cultural paranoia, and the dread of nuclear extermination that would now be replaced by the dread of Y2K looming at the end of the decade as the next form of technological apocalypse. The culture would change considerably toward the decade’s end with an improving economy and organized efforts to remediate and eliminate Y2K, as we will see reflected in the changing attitudes expressed in most invasion films at the decade’s end; but initially the focus is on anxiety and uncertainty in the context of a now disoriented nation state.